Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Web & mobile developer & consultant
Editor & contributor at mobiForge
Author of "AMP: Building Accelerated Mobile Pages"
Runs westerntechnological.ie
Latest Articles by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Progressive Web Apps are the future!
December 9, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
It’s an exciting time for Progressive Web Apps right now. The term Progressive Web App refers to a group of technologies, such as service workers, and push notifications, that can bring native-like performance and user experience to web apps. (We've written about them before here and here)... Read More
Google AMP: Coming to your search results early next year
November 26, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
It’s been just a month and a half since the world got its first taste of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a technology from Google that aims to speed up the web. By embracing AMP, and following its rules, you can enjoy a performance boost to your web pages that will download in a fraction of the time than without. The demos and case studies are pretty impressive... Read More
HTML5 for the mobile Web: the Network Information API
November 24, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
The Network Information API is a HTML5 API for acquiring information about a device’s network connection. Despite not being a standard, it enjoys decent support across the main mobile browsers. It’s a pretty simple API to use, particularly in comparison with some of the HTML5 APIs we’ve looked at recently on this site (Service Workers, I’m looking at you!)... Read More
Web app manifests usher new wave of progressive apps to your homescreen
November 3, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
One can’t deny the irresistible convenience of using a homescreen launcher icon to fire up a web app. Variously referred to as a bookmark icon, shortcut, or homepage icon, why shouldn’t such an icon be able to launch a web page, as well as a native app? And of course it can: this functionality has been available in Android and iOS for years. Indeed, the notion of a desktop shortcut has been around since the first GUI interfaces were developed. So why are we still talking about them in 2015?... Read More
Taking the web offline with service workers
October 21, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
You’re probably already familiar with the idea of offline web apps, web apps that can continue to work in the face of intermittent network connectivity. This concept has been around for a while, and various technologies have been developed along the way to achieve offline web apps, (Google) Gears, and Appcache for example, but none of these addressed the offline challenge quite as well as service workers... Read More
Web push notifications
September 17, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Web push notifications are the best thing to hit the web since the hyperlink! No kidding, this technology is going to be huge. Until recently web developers could only dream of push enabled web apps. Things have changed however, and web push notifications, the asynchronous delivery of messages to a user's device from a website, even when the website is not open in the browser, are now a reality thanks to a number of HTML5 APIs:... Read More
Touch-friendly Drag and Drop
July 22, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
In this article we explore some touch-friendly drag and drop implementations. In particular we'll be looking at DOM and canvas-based drag and drop approaches. We'll also build on some of the things we learned in previous HTML5 articles on mobiForge... Read More
Mobile browser stats by country
July 13, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Below you can explore web usage broken down by mobile browser and country. Select a country to see the browser stats for that country. DeviceAtlas allows you to access mobile traffic data sourced from thousands of websites from all over the world. You can browse many kinds of stats across over 70 countries. Each data point shows the percentage of traffic generated by a certain kind of device. Visit DeviceAtlas to access more data... Read More
The HTML5 Pointer Events API: Combining touch, mouse, and pen
June 15, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
The Pointer Events API is an HTML5 specification that combines touch, mouse, pen and other inputs into a single unified API. It is less well supported than the Touch Events API, although support is growing, with all the major browsers working on an implementation, except for Apple's Safari. There's a colorful background to how the current state of browser support for this API came to be which we covered previously on mobiForge, but in this article we'll just look at its usage... Read More
Internet.org: it’s got 99 problems but mobile-friendliness ain’t one
May 27, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Back in August 2013 Facebook announced its Internet.org plan to bring Internet access to the next billion people in developing countries. Most of the media coverage has focused on whether or not it violates net-neutrality, if it's creating a two-tiered Internet, or if it's just another walled-garden with Facebook as gatekeeper. In this post, we set aside those issues for the time being, and focus instead on the technical guidelines for getting a site included in Internet.org... Read More
